An unexperienced cook's adventures in the kitchen

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Chiffonade is a weird word. When I first saw “4 leaves basil, chiffonade” in a recipe for spinach tortellini, I thought it was saying that I needed to make the basil look like chiffon fabric or something.

All I can say is thank goodness for Google. Turns out chiffonade is a certain way to cut herbs such as basil.

In an effort to mix up the fish I eat, I’ve expanded my fish selection from salmon, to salmon and tilapia. When looking for different ways to make tilapia tasty, I stumbled across the absolute best tilapia recipe ever – garlic alfredo tilapio.

When making it, I adjusted the recipe to one serving. Which made for some problems. Like what is the difference between tsp and tbsp? How many tsps are in tbsps? Luckily I googled that and it turns out google really does know everything!

They have this nice converter where you can figure out how many is in each thing. You really do use math after college (but google does all the work for you). It was pretty fabulous.

But next problem – it turns out you have to unfreeze tilapia before you cook it. So I put the tilapia in a bag and put the bag in a pot of water. But the directions on the tilapia packaging said the water had to be cold, so that’s why there is ice cubes in the pot.

Then after the tilapia was no longer frozen, I patted it dry with a paper towel and put it on tin foil. I wasn’t able to find the creole seasoning in the grocery store, so I ended up using Italian seasoning. Which most likely gave it a different flavoring but I loved it!

While the fish was in the oven, I put the butter, garlic, and alfredo sauce in a pan. Once the fish was done, I used a fork to do the fork test, which my roommate told me about. You put the fork in the fish and twist, and if it breaks easily into flakes, it’s done! You then put the sauce on the fish, add more seasoning and voila, a delicious meal.

Up until I recently, I didn’t realize how life changing avocado is. Avocado is super healthy for you and can be used for just about any meal. By far though, my favorite use for avocado is guacamole.

This is the best recipe for guacamole that I’ve found. While it doesn’t taste exactly like Chipotle’s guac, it’s still super scrumptious. This recipe calls for avocados, lime, salt, onion, cilantro, tomatoes, garlic and cayenne pepper. I don’t use cayenne pepper since the garlic gives the guacamole enough of a kick.

The first time I made this guacamole, it took me about an hour to make just because I had to look up every single thing. Like what’s diced onion? How does dicing differ from mincing? I don’t know how people cooked before the internet.

What’s diced onion? WikiHow explains it here. Basically you just peel the skin off the onion, cut the onion ends off, cut it in half, cut the onion in strips with the flat end facing downward, and then cut the other direction.

What’s minced garlic? WikiHow explains it here. Just cut off the hard end of the garlic, peel off the skin, cut in strips lengthwise, then cut the other direction. To make it super thin, run the knife across the garlic again.

While I ate a majority of the guacamole before I remembered to take a picture, here’s a picture of the avocados partly mashed. I absolutely love this picture because everything looks so fresh! Fresh guac is probably one of my most favorite things in the world. Hope you enjoy!

Some recipes seem better on screen than they taste. A good example of this would be creamy avocado pasta. I had some avocados I needed to use up and was in the mood for some pasta. I hunted online for some recipes and came across creamy avocado pasta.

It looked delicious and was easy to make. You just toss some items into a blender to make the sauce. But it didn’t taste good. First, the texture was really weird. Maybe I’m just not used to avocado as a sauce but I didn’t like it. Second, I probably should have diced the garlic before I put it in the blender. I thought the blender would get it, so I just chopped the garlic into large pieces. But the blender didn’t catch all the garlic, so I ended up eating some rather large hunks of garlic. Let me tell you, not tasty. Third, you can’t save leftovers. The avocado turns brown and smelled rather weird.

Yes, this recipe is easy to make but I definitely won’t be making it again.